It’s been more than 28 years since the Hartford Whalers took their toys and went home to their new home in North Carolina where they became the Carolina Hurricanes.
But you still see the classic Whalers logo everywhere you look. The Hartford Yard Goats wear Whalers colors. There are Reddit threads and Instagram accounts and Facebook groups all hoping to one day bring back the Whalers.
But here’s the thing, Connecticut: The NHL may be long gone, but we’ve got three pro hockey teams here right now, today. Danbury’s got the Hat Tricks. And we’ve got two affiliated minor league teams, the Bridgeport Islanders and the Rangers farm team, the Hartford Wolf Pack.
Scott Wheeler, who writes about NHL prospects for The Athletic, is most excited about the roster in Hartford this year. He says that’s largely because of forward Gabe Perreault, who the Rangers drafted in the first round in 2023.
“Gabe is coming off of two excellent seasons at Boston College,” Wheeler said. “He was one of the most talented players in college hockey, and before that, he actually set and broke the record for points by a player at the United States National Team Development Program.”
But Bridgeport’s Islanders have some guys to keep an eye on, too.
"I think the name, the draw with the Bridgeport club this year will be Calum Ritchie,” Wheeler said. Ritchie is a center and also a first-round draft pick from 2023. Wheeler thinks Ritchie will be among the 10 or 15 best young prospects playing in the league.
‘We kind of love it now’
The Islanders opened their 25th season in Bridgeport in early October. I talked to some fans at the game, like Caleb Christian from Seymour. He’s 11, and he got into hockey after a school trip to an Islanders game.
“My school was singing the National Anthem,” Caleb said, “and then I just really started liking it.”
And the fun part is that Caleb got his dad, Gabriel Christian, into hockey, too — rather than the other way around.
Gabriel said he grew up a baseball fan, but going to the games with Caleb has gotten him hooked on hockey. “We kind of love it now,” he said.
Kelly Skarzinski from Monroe did sort of the opposite thing. She got into hockey because her dad played, and she goes to games now with her mom, who has season tickets.
The Skarzinskis are pretty tough fans. They’re excited about some of those prospects, the Islanders’ new goalie, even their new manager. But mostly … they want wins!
‘You owe it to the fans’
I thought about the disappointed Skarzinskis later that night when the Islanders lost in overtime, 3-2.
But this is minor league hockey. It’s more about family entertainment — the mascots, the bobblehead giveaways, the ’80s nights, the teddy bear tosses.
As far as the hockey goes, the focus is more on developing the players than it is on winning the games.
At the Danbury Hat Tricks’ opening night Oct. 10, their new general manager, AJ Galante, told me there’s a delicate balance between what’s best for the players and the organization and actually really trying to win the games.
“You owe it to the players to help develop them and get them to another level,” Galante said. “You owe it to the organization to have the best product on the ice. And you owe it to the fans. So there is a balance.”
‘It’s going to be a gritty game’
Danbury is different from Hartford and Bridgeport. The Hat Tricks aren’t affiliated with an NHL team. They play in the FPHL, the Federal Prospects Hockey League, kind of an entry-level pro league.
“It’s like single-A baseball. I mean, we have a very young team,” Galante said. “Four or five guys just today played their first professional game. So it’s a very competitive league.”
There’s another thing that’s different about Danbury. At that opening night game, I talked to Donnie Sweeter. He brings his 10-year-old son to the games from Granby, more than an hour away. I asked him why.
“Just ’cause there’s more action here,” Sweeter told me. “The atmosphere, too, is incredible here.”
By “action,” Sweeter means fighting and hitting and checking. And he’s not wrong that there’s more of it in Danbury.
An average NHL game includes about seven penalties. The game I saw in Danbury had 33, including 11 resulting from four different fights.
There was a fight literally two seconds into the game.
I should say that, as part of my reporting for this story, I went and saw two periods of a preseason game between Hartford and Bridgeport that wasn’t open to the public. And in those two periods, there were two fights that led to five penalties and 21 penalty minutes — in a minor-league preseason game with no audience.
Which is to say … hockey gonna hockey.
But hockey hockeys more, it seems like, in the Hat City.
“Listen, it’s a Danbury thing,” Galante said. “I mean, dating back to the Trashers.”
Twenty years ago, as a teenager, Galante was GM of the long defunct, and infamously aggressive, Danbury Trashers hockey team.
“You know it’s going to be a gritty game. It’s going to be a special year,” Galante said.
So even with the Whalers gone almost 30 years, whatever kind of hockey you like, Connecticut’s probably got it.
